Celso Costantini’s Critique of Novecentismo: The Modernity of Christian and Missionary Art

In the last decades, the material and medial turn has profoundly reshaped how we approach literature, art, and culture. Rather than conceiving works exclusively as vehicles of representation, scholars have become increasingly attentive to the ways in which texts, images, and performances are produced, transmitted, and received through material supports and technical media. Thus, the modernist field is no longer seen as a closed canon of exemplary works and authors. Instead, the plurality of modernisms – literary, visual, performative, and cross-disciplinary – has become a guiding concept. By interrogating the infrastructures, artefacts, and supports of modernist
production, we encounter not one but many modernisms: sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, always historically situated. The same happens for each essay presented here, which contributes in a very specific way to a key proposition debated during the 3rd CEMS conference in Lisbon and consolidated in this volume: materiality is not simply a property of objects but a performative process that shapes meaning, perception, and forms of knowledge production and conception.